


Fugitives

by TaFuilLiom



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Roadtrip even though they're running from the law, Sanvers implied, Space Dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 15:57:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13170252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaFuilLiom/pseuds/TaFuilLiom
Summary: J’onn J’onzz suspects that Alex Danvers is, as the humans say, deeply in the closet.Post 1x17; when J'onn and Alex go on the run, and of course J'onn knows; he's psychic.





	Fugitives

**Author's Note:**

> Just been thinking about Space Dad and Alex during 1x18 when they're on the run, and also how J'onn knew about Alex's sexuality but didn't say anything. Tw//Internalised Homophobia. Gimme a bop if you would want another one of these.
> 
> Hope you enjoy, lads x

_ [tw//implied (party) casual drug use, tw//Internalised homophobia] _

 

_ “How come you never said anything before?” _

_ “It’s not for me to say. Good for you, Alex.” _

 

  * **_**_Alex & J’onn, 2x11_**_**



 

 

He has a feeling, always had. 

But human sexuality is rarely as cut and dry as it seems, so he never presumes. It never affects her ability to do her job, nor does it shape her as an agent. But it does radiate pulses of loneliness. 

J’onn J’onzz suspects that Alex Danvers is, as the humans say, deeply in the closet. 

Occasionally, he receives stabs of shame and self-loathing, but they are quickly stifled and repressed. He wishes he could tell her, but she isn’t ready, and it isn’t his place. 

So he lets her fester. 

***********************

“I don’t ever want to do that again.”

She looks up at him from one of the single beds, features tight. 

“But you’ll have to. We have no other way, unless you suggest we hurt people,” she counters.

He watches her count the cash. Checking it twice, she stuffs it under her helmet on the nightstand. A few unsuspecting patrons stumbling out of a roadside dive had been dragged into the shadows, mindwiped, and robbed.

He knows what clawing at survival felt like. He tastes it once again. 

Hearing her thoughts ringing around his head, he suspects his psychic powers are going to be a peril of their relationship. 

She stares at her hands. He hears her as she thinks about the possibility of finding her father after years of thinking he had perished in a plane crash.

Instead she says, “Do you think we’ll have to run forever?”

He sinks down onto the other bed, facing her. “We can never keep running, Alex. It’s impossible. Eventually, our fears will catch us, and we have to face them.”

She twitches at the unexpected answer, and he gets a surge of feeling; involuntarily, she was applying his meaning to other scenarios-  _ other fears _ \- completely. 

She shoots to her feet, like a surge of electricity hit her. She grabs one of the plastic bags they had laid on the musty couch. Tearing the tags off of the cheap sleepwear, she nods to the bathroom.

“I’m just going to…”

She grips the bland-checkered pyjamas, and darts into the ensuite. 

He stares at the faded door, sensing the self-deprecation coming off of her in waves. She may as well have opened the door and lashed ice water over him. He shuts her out with a sigh. 

_ You can’t keep running, Alex.  _

*************************

“J’onn?”

A whisper in the dark. 

“Yes?”

“Why did Major Lane change her mind? About sending us to Cadmus?”

He can lie to her, and take a little weight off the burden in her soul. Or he can tell her the truth, and let the chokehold tighten. 

“Why do you ask?” he edges. 

A deep exhale. “Because…”

She doesn’t finish the sentence, doesn’t need to. He is well aware of her attraction, no matter how she tries to shove it down and away. She rolls on her side, facing away. 

He stares at the ceiling, not needing to wrap his mind around hers to see what she is thinking. It is so clear, he can almost get clear images. 

Lucy in her leather jacket. In her uniform. In a blouse and slacks and  _ power suit.  _

In nothing at all - except Alex’s bedsheets.

And then a wall. 

He can feel the pickup of her heartbeat, the way she races to clear her mind, push it all away. She thinks it is dirty, disgusting, wrong. Echoes of other voices enter her head, things she has heard people saying over the years. She had to be perfect, for herself, for Kara,  _ for her mother _ .

His heart aches for her. He hopes one day she would meet a woman that could change her mind.  

“Goodnight, Alex.”

She doesn’t reply, pretending to be asleep. But he knows she isn’t.  

******************

A blonde Alex Danvers is shocking, wig or not. 

She weaves her way back through the tables, her sunglasses hiding her expression right up until she slides into the booth opposite him. Finally, she takes them off, folding them into the top of her t-shirt. 

“You didn’t put in the contacts?”

She shakes her head. “Tried to do it with one and almost put my eye out. So forget it. No contacts.” She smirks. “I guess Kara remains the only blue-eyed Danvers.”

A sunny waitress brings them breakfast and fills their mugs to the brim with coffee. Alex’s eyes linger on her as she goes to attend to another table. He senses that while the cheery attitude might be making Alex’s heart pang for Kara, that gaze is not entirely innocent. 

They tuck into eggs and bacon, eating without speaking. The roadside diner provides plenty of noise to discourage conversation. 

A girl chooses a seat at the table over from them. She takes off her grey beanie to reveal hair streaked with pink and purple. She’s gay, he knows, because she’s thinking very loudly about how happy she is to be getting pancakes with her girlfriend, who is paying at the counter. The warm affection shines at him, even from this distance. 

He is polishing off his coffee when another girl, this one a redhead, joins her companion at the table over from them-  _ girlfriend _ , he already knows. They exchange a few words trapped between giggles, and then the redhead leans over to plant a soft kiss on her girlfriend’s-  _ lover’s _ \- lips. 

Across from him, Alex’s own lips pull into a sneer. She turns away and stares down into her black coffee. 

“I don’t believe that you’re homophobic, Alex,” he states. 

Alex’s attention snaps to him. “I’m not.”

Maybe it’s the thrill of being on the run, or maybe its the absurdity of her blonde wig-  _ pretending to be in someone else’s skin when she has never let herself be in her own.  _ But he pushes further, gently.

“I’ve never known you to be hostile to displays of affection before.”

“I’m not being hostile!” she hisses.

He peers around her, watching the redhead pour syrup on her pancakes. Too much, it seems, because her companion makes a sharp comment that coaxes another giggle before she abruptly hands over the jug.

“They’re only young, Alex,” he says mildly. 

She grips her mug. The blonde wig only accentuates the blush rising in her cheeks; the mixture of frustration, shame and embarrassment seeping into her appearance. 

A part of her is envious, he knows that. 

She does not, hiding behind a concrete wall of denial. 

This time when the waitress alights at their table with a coffee refill, Alex concentrates on the chip in her mug instead of the chirpy blonde. He tries to reach out to her through the dark mood. 

All he sees is a swarthing, confused void.

*********************** 

On the third night, she finally breaks the tags off her disguises. She models them in front of the mirror. How she can see anything through all the dust and smears on the glass, he has no idea, but each ensemble makes his lips twitch into a smile. 

“I look ridiculous in baby pink.”

“I think that’s the point.”

“You’re so lucky you can just shapeshift,” she says, taking off the pink jacket and folding it. 

She roots through one of the bags for another selection. Lifting out a powder blue cardigan, she makes a face, but slips it over her shoulders, turning this way and that. 

“I look like a sweet soccer mom who has the lawyer husband, the two kids and the picket fence,” she smoothes her hands over the cardigan and grins. “I stay at home and bake cookies and sometimes I walk the family golden retriever.”

He chuckles, untying his boots and kicking them off. “Sounds like the ideal life.”

“More like suburban hell.” 

He rubs the back of his neck as the room quietens. He anticipates her conversation, sitting straight again. Her mind settles as she works over some words. She picks at a piece of fluff on the cardigan before speaking.

“I used to imagine I’d have a life like that. Get hired by a great lab, marry a nice man, raise some kids by the beach like I was.” She tilts her head, tracing the small pearl buttons. “I could teach them to surf. In summer he could barbecue on the deck, and winter nights we could wrap up and gaze up at the stars like Kara and I used to…”

She comes back to herself, sobering. He watches it all; the way the light goes from her eyes, how jest turns to sorrow. She takes off the cardigan, fingers curling into fists around the material.

“Gave it up as a pipe dream long ago. It isn’t the life I was meant to have, and I don’t even think that’s what I want anyway.”

She throws the clothes back in to the bag, shoving it over to the couch with her toe. 

“And what do you want, Alex?”

She doesn’t think about a woman, a wife, a house and a dog and a wedding with two brides. He doesn’t expect her to. Her thoughts are that same pool of confusion, because the emotions are there,  _ the desire _ is there, but the realisation isn’t. 

He has collected these flashes over time. Curiosities about soft skin, softer lips. 

Once, she caught James and Lucy heatedly kissing after a party at Kara’s where everyone had had a touch too much liquor. The next day, every time J’onn was with Alex, he could hear her trying to process what she had seen and why she felt such a strong reaction. 

How her stomach dropped at the whimpers and sighs that had escaped Lucy’s lips. 

Alex had eventually come to the conclusion that she had somewhat of a crush on James, and the clenching of her stomach was jealousy at their relationship. Later, when she discovered she didn’t feel anything except a brotherly fondness for him, she decided that it had just been loneliness.

Her attraction to women is so telling, even when she doesn’t recognise it yet. 

But right now, what she does think about is Kara, her mother, her lab, the DEO. There’s a small spark of a chance of being the DEO director one day, a spark of pride after that, and then nothing. 

And  _ then- _

“I don’t know about the future. But what we’re doing here? This is...” Her throat catches, and she clears it quickly. “I want to know if my dad really is still alive.”

When he doesn’t reply, she grows agitated by the silence. She marches over to the other shopping bags; reaches in and takes out a bottle of scotch. 

“I don’t recall that being on our shopping list,” he says carefully.

“It was on mine,” she mumbles, twisting open the cap. 

Her mind pulses with memories, painful and jarring and he almost asks out loud for her to stop thinking. She tips her head back, letting the alcohol slide down her throat, and he doesn’t stop her. 

It is the first time in three years that she reminds him of that lost girl he found all that time ago. The girl trying to sober up-  _ she often jokes about being drunk that night, but she was coming down, not sobering up-  _ stuck in a jail cell. 

Time and discipline and a new purpose in life washed the party girl out of Alex. 

But not the loneliness.

**********************

They return alive and safe, and to the outside, they are unaltered. 

Alex isn’t exactly unfazed by the turn of events; the almost being forced by Myriad to kill her sister, and then flying into space to save her. She certainly isn’t untouched by the way she has to confess to her mother that Jeremiah may still be alive. 

But J’onn is different. Those days on the run taught him a lot about Alex. She couldn’t keep her guard up around him on her own, not without the help of all the daily DEO distractions. 

She doesn’t know it, but he hurts for her harder than he ever did before.

**********************

When Maggie Sawyer first enters the DEO, it’s because Alex is fussing over her. They had rescued her from Scorcher, and both the agent and Supergirl had insisted she come to be checked out.

At first, when he picks up the unusual presence, he marches towards them, intending to give out a stern rebuttal about bringing in outsiders to the base. 

But when he gets close enough, he pauses. 

He recognises the slight-panic, slight-giddy patterns of Alex; more specifically, when Alex is around a woman that she is attracted to. 

If anyone brings strays into work, it is Kara; not Alex. 

Whoever this Maggie Sawyer is, she has to be something special.

_ Very special. _

He smiles as he walks away, deciding maybe Maggie Sawyer can be added to the ragtag list of ‘outsiders’ allowed into the DEO after all.  

 


End file.
